The Trump campaign-linked data firm Cambridge Analytica
began testing out slogans like "Drain the Swamp" and "Build the
Wall" the same year Russia began its social media influence
operation targeting the 2016 election.

Cambridge Analytica has denied any links to Russian
entities or individuals.

The firm attracted scrutiny when a whistleblower said
Cambridge Analytica executives met with executives of a
sanctioned Russian oil producer in 2014 and 2015 to discuss
politically targeting messages toward American voters.

Cambridge Analytica executives were also secretly
filmed boasting about how they used shadowy online propaganda
tools to help Donald Trump win the 2016 US election.

The London-based data firm Cambridge Analytica was testing out
slogans like "Drain the Swamp" and "Build
the Wall" as early as 2014, the same year Russia launched its
social media influence operation targeting the 2016 US election.

Ad

Those slogans would later become the bedrock of Republican
nominee Donald Trump's platform while he campaigned for the
presidency. He invoked them frequently at his rallies, and his
supporters often chanted them.

"We were testing all kinds of messages and all kinds of imagery,
which included images of walls, people scaling walls,"
Christopher Wylie, a former employee at Cambridge Analytica,
told CNN. "We tested 'drain
the swamp' ... ideas of the deep state and the NSA watching you
and the government is conspiring against you."

"And a lot of these narratives, which at the time would have
seemed crazy for a mainstream candidate to run on, those were the
things that we were finding that there were pockets of Americans
who this really appealed to," Wylie added.

Ad

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and Trump
campaign CEO, sat on the data firm's board of directors, which is
largely backed by Republican megadonor Robert Mercer.

Wylie said Monday that Bannon's push for the Trump campaign to
endorse far-right positions on issues like immigration and law
enforcement largely stemmed from Cambridge Analytica's research
on those topics.

The Trump campaign hired Bannon in the summer of 2016. Around the
same time, it also tapped Cambridge Analytica to manage its data
operation.

A Trump aide told Wired that the firm
played a "key role" in identifying political donors that helped
them raise $80 million in July 2016.

"I was surprised when I saw the Trump campaign, and when it
started talking about, you know, building walls or draining the
swamp, and I'm remembering in my head, 'Wait we tested this,'"
Wylie told CNN.

CA executives caught bragging about winning Trump the election

caption

Cambridge Analytica executives described their techniques multiple times to an undercover reporter between November 2017 and January 2018.

source

Channel 4 News

On Tuesday, UK's Channel 4 published video footage of
Cambridge Analytica executives boasting about how they used
online propaganda tools to help Trump win the election.

In one exchange, the firm's CEO, Alexander Nix, told an
undercover reporter that he had personally met Trump "many times"
and spelled out what the firm undertook for the then-Republican
candidate.

"We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all
the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the digital
campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the
strategy," he was filmed saying.

"When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular
vote by three million votes but won the Electoral College vote
that's down to the data and the research," he said.

The news came following a separate Channel 4 report on Monday, in
which executives talked about tactics the firm used to push out
damaging material on its clients' opponents.

Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica
Political Global, told an undercover Channel 4 reporter posing as
a client, "We just put information into the bloodstream of the
internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push
every now and again ... like a remote control."

Turnbull added, "It has to happen without anyone thinking,
'that's propaganda,' because the moment you think 'that's
propaganda,' the next question is, 'who's put that out?'"

Nix denied any wrongdoing in a
statement after the investigation was published, adding that
executives were "playing along" with the undercover reporter to
"spare" him "from embarrassment."

CA's shadowy Russia ties

Cambridge Analytica has long faced
questions from investigators over its potential engagement with
foreign actors, like Russia and WikiLeaks, during the 2016
election.

Last year, it emerged that Congressional lawmakers were
probing whether voter information that Russian hackers stole
from election databases in several states made its way to the
Trump campaign. Investigators are also examining whether the
Trump campaign's data firms coordinated with Russia to
disseminate fake news and propaganda in particular states and
districts.

Cambridge Analytica's technique of pushing information onto the
internet as described by Turnbull appears to bear some
similarities to Russia's actions when it carried out a
large-scale and widespread social media influence operation
targeting the 2016 election.

The main organization responsible for Russia's influence
operation was the Internet Research Agency, a notorious "troll
farm" based in St. Petersburg.

"Beginning as early as 2014," the IRA "began operations to
interfere with the US political system, including the 2016 US
presidential election," according to the indictment. The IRA received millions in
funding from Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and
close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The IRA registered with the Russian government as a corporate
entity in July 2013, the court filing said.

In April 2014, the IRA formed the "translator project," which was
focused on the US and conducted operations on popular social
media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube,
according to the indictment. By July 2016, more than 80 employees
were working on the "translator project."

By the time the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June
2016, Russia had decided to throw its support behind elevating
Trump to the presidency.

The IRA and the 13 Russian nationals who were indicted then began
pushing out pro-Trump propaganda and fake news meant to sow
discord and discourage voters from casting ballots for Trump's
opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

When British investigators asked Cambridge Analytica CEO
Alexander Nix if the firm had any links to Russia, he replied,
"We've never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any
other country, and we don't have any relationship with Russia or
Russian individuals."

But Wylie's account of the firm's activities appears to
contradict Nix's claim. Wylie told The New York Times last
weekend that the Russian oil giant Lukoil repeatedly showed an
interest in how Cambridge Analytica used data to target messages
toward American voters.

Cambridge Analytica executives reportedly met at least three
times with Lukoil executives in 2014 and 2015, around when
Cambridge Analytica began testing out pro-Trump slogans and
Russia's influence campaign was in its nascent stages.

According to Wylie, the meetings involved discussions of how to
harvest information from social media to create politically
targeted messages toward American voters.

"I remember being super confused," Wylie told The Times. He
reportedly attended one of the meetings between Lukoil and
Cambridge Analytica executives, which included Nix.

"I kept asking Alexander, 'Can you explain to me what they
want?'" Wylie recalled. "I don't understand why Lukoil wants to
know about political targeting in America. We're sending them
stuff about political targeting - they then come and ask more
about political targeting."

He added that Lukoil "just didn't seem to be interested" in how
the firm's techniques could be used commercially.

Lukoil has been used as a tool of the Russian government in the
past, and it was one of five major Russian oil producers the US
banned when former President Barack Obama imposed sweeping
sanctions on Russia in 2014 as punishment for its aggression
toward neighboring Ukraine.

On Friday, Facebook announced that it had removed
Cambridge Analytica from its platform after it emerged that the
firm harvested the personal data of
50 million Facebook users for targeted political advertisements
without their permission.